Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and the chapbook Punishment (Rattle chapbook series), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, Waxwing, Plume, The Rumpus, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded with Ellen Bass an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, and Juvenile Hall. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. More at: nancymillergomez.com.
***
I met Nancy Miller Gomez at Pacific University’s MFA program. Since graduation, she and I have been part of an online writing group with a few other members of our cohort. I have always been struck by Nancy’s tremendous energy and her dedication to the literary community, and I was grateful to speak with her about her background and her work.
Rebecca Patrascu: Inconsolable Objects is a beautiful book, full of the weird and the wonderful, and it takes such a compassionate look at what it means to be human. I love the cover, and I want to start there because it’s such an evocative image, and it hints at so many of the themes and subjects in your poems. There’s a child in a white dress facing the wall in a corner of an empty room with peeling wallpaper. She’s isolated but at the same time seems completely self-contained, while around her everything is weathered or wild: an owl with a dead mouse, a small toy giraffe, the tips of lobster claws just coming into view. Like your poetry, it’s an intriguing mix of mystery, vulnerability, the forsaken, and an attention to small quirky details.
Nancy Miller Gomez: I found the art we used on the cover maybe eight years ago. The minute I saw it, I thought, if I ever publish a book, that’s the image I want to have on the cover. I look at that image, and it feels so familiar to me. It’s a collage by an artist in England, Alexandra Gallagher, and I’m very lucky she was willing to license the rights to us. My editor, KMA at YesYes Books, was apprehensive, because she often can’t work with art an author has fallen in love with. But when she saw it, she immediately agreed, and then Alban Fischer, the designer, came up with the rest of the design. He was the one who chose the bright pink title. When I first saw it, I thought, not pink. I’m not a pink person. And KMA said, “Think about it.” “Alright,” I said, and then, “Hmmm. I’m kind of liking the pink. I kind of want to co-opt the pink.”
RP: I know that you’re a collector of many abandoned (if not consolable) objects. But you’re also a collector of stories, and you remember and can recount the story behind each found item, whether it’s a broken chair, a doorknob, a fossil, or old photos of strangers, like those passed off as relatives in the poem “My Family.” It’s an impressive feat, and it speaks to your powers of recall. Among other careers, you practiced law, and I wonder whether that work trained you to retain information, or whether you already remembered everything, which helped you as an attorney.
NMG: I don’t think being a lawyer trained me to retain information. I think being inherently inclined to notice things and tell stories helped me be a better lawyer. I’ve always been someone who paid attention to certain things, although not always what I’m supposed to be paying attention to. In grade school I was the kid who looked out the window. I remember every detail of the grassy slope near the school where three horses used to graze. I can tell you everything about the coloring and temperament of those horses, but not much about the classroom.
I also tend to notice the things that other people overlook, and I’ve always told stories. I wanted to be a writer, but life intervened and I went to law school instead. In law school I studied like my life depended on it. When first semester grades came back, I was ranked number one in my class. You’d think I’d have been happy about that, but I ended up in the counselor’s office sobbing. Maybe I’d secretly hoped I’d fail at law so I could go back to being a writer. After graduating, I practiced with a top law firm in L.A. I was good at what I did, maybe because I was able to tell stories in a succinct and compelling way. But mostly I was defending corporations, and I wasn’t happy in the work.
When I took a break from law I attended a writing program at USC with fantastic teachers, like Hubert Selby Jr. and T.C. Boyle, and I was six credits away from graduating when I had to leave to support my children because I was, by then, a single parent. And because I had studied documentary filmmaking as an undergrad, I went into television and started a production company. I thought from that vantage point I could tell important stories and change the world. But I ended up working on what later became known as reality TV. And that is a business that will suck the soul right out of you. Eighteen years later I finally came back to writing.
I was living in Santa Cruz, and I was very fortunate to find Ellen Bass. I don’t know if I would have come back to writing poetry if I hadn’t met Ellen. I really don’t. I loved poetry, and I dabbled in writing it, but I was drawn to writing fiction, and prose. I’d always wanted to tell stories. It’s the whole reason I got into television—although even after producing hundreds and hundreds of hours of programming, I never got to tell the stories I wanted to tell in that medium.
Then I started to write fiction, but I wasn’t the writer I wanted to be. Many of my favorite writers started as poets. So, I began to study poetry in earnest. I think I needed to face my fears—poetry was so intimidating—because, as you know, poets are the fighter pilots of the writing world. I emailed Ellen and said, “Can I come to your poetry workshop?” and she let me in, even though I was a terrible poet. And that’s when I really started to think, okay, I’m going to learn how to do this poetry stuff. I’m going to get good at this. Because I wanted it to make me a better writer. And then you know what happens. Poetry just sucks you in, and it becomes its own thing. I fell in love with poetry, and I fell in love with writing poetry. I still write prose, and I still intend to go back to writing fiction. But in the meantime, I’m all in on this poetry thing.
RP: And doing it so beautifully. Going back to the storytelling for a moment: you talked about always wanting to tell stories. Based on our previous conversations and the magical quality of some of the poems in this book, I wondered whether you were a child who read fairy tales.
NMG: Oh yes. I loved fairy tales as a child. I loved books and reading, and I was a voracious reader. I spent much of my free time reading, but not that much time talking to other people. So I had this extensive vocabulary and used a lot of big words, very precocious for my age. But I didn’t know how to pronounce many of the big words I used. I’d get the meaning right but the pronunciation all wrong. My mother used to think it was just hysterical when I’d tell her I was feeling fat-ti-gewd. Or that I wanted to go to the mah-teen-ee. I had my own language, and the people around me got some laughs out of that.
RP: Your book gives us many glimpses of the early development of your relationship to language and your preoccupations. In “Coachwhip,” you say you were “a child / plagued by imagination.” “Childhood Insomnia” struck me with its image of a girl lying in bed, “worried / what the hours would do / if I wasn’t awake to witness them.” It describes how you learned to make time your own by repeating interesting words to yourself, and in “Nancyland: A Visitor’s Guide” you carry rocks and other bits of the world in your pockets. It’s clear to me you were born a poet. Even “Heavens to Betsy,” which describes you as a child taking idioms literally, is really, to me, proof of this. You have often said that you’re literal-minded, but I think that your literalism fed your writing. You knew that the idioms your mother used, like her saying she was besides herself, weren’t true, but they sparked your imagination.
NMG: Yeah, well. Thank you for that compliment. Because I do have a very literal brain. I’m very logical, and I have to work to cultivate those leaps that I so admire in other poets. They don’t always come naturally to me, because I’m so narrative-driven that things need to make sense. There needs to be a narrative thread. So even if things jump off into some imaginative leap, I need them to come back again and touch down at some point in the narrative so I can follow it. Like breadcrumbs, right? Or I get lost. I really admire poets who can write wildly in those sort of free-associative ways, but I often will get lost in a poem if I don’t have narrative touchstones to keep me grounded. My mind can’t find its way through the poem otherwise.
RP: Your poems are often inspired by journalism—both mainstream news stories and more obscure articles about things like slugs and snails, or muons, or the notes in a bird’s song. You take these headlines and details and transform them into the answers for questions we may not have even clearly articulated yet about what it means to be human. When a story catches your attention and sparks a poem, do you know out the gate how you want to respond to it, or does the poem sometimes dictate where you go?
NMG: I would say I almost never know where something’s going to take me. I keep sort of a list of ideas, a scroll, thanks to Marvin Bell, who suggested his students do that. When I come across something that I find really intriguing, that feels like it might have a poem in it, I will put that in my scroll, and save it, and save the source material. Then I usually will write from an epigraph taken out of that news story. The payoff is twofold: it’s a way for me to get out of my own head, to get out of my own life, and not just write about myself all the time. It encourages me to write about the bigger-picture world. So, I do like it for that. But at the same time, I don’t always know what it is about that headline, or that epigraph, that I find so fascinating. Sometimes, it’s just a really bizarre, odd fact that I’ve come across. Like, there’s a poem that I wrote about a flatworm that can self-decapitate. Its head goes off, its body dies, and then the head grows a new body from the neck down. That’s pretty cool, right? There’s got to be a poem in that. And muons. I read an article about how there were these particles in physics that weren’t behaving like the scientists had predicted they would. And I’m like, you go, muon. There’s a poem.
RP: There’s quite a bit in Inconsolable Objects that has that muon’s rebellion—or even danger. The opening poem “Snapshot,” sets the tone with, “I was a hand grenade of a girl / vacuum packed into a dress” and “My eyes— / two foxholes. No light escaped. My lips // stretched across my face like a trip wire.” The first section is especially dark: there’s a tornado, dead and dying animals, a self-destructive husband and his death, the creepy images of Victorian mothers half-hidden in photos of their babies, silenced women, a disembodied heart, a songbird mimicking an ambulance. In other sections, we’re outside rehab clinics, or jails or hospitals or war zones. I was reminded of Something Wicked this Way Comes with the small-town poems about the fairgrounds, the tilt-a-whirl, “House of Freaks,” and the title poem with its “three fetal mice floating in a snow globe filled with formaldehyde and glitter….” There’s an edge of fear, too, even in the final lines of the book. Tackling sinister or frightening subjects honestly must mean you’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Do you think that writing poetry demanded of you a level of vulnerability that you wouldn’t have reached in prose? How do you remain honest and tender, and still protect yourself, while facing the darker aspects of life?
NMG: I think that poetry is what keeps me and everyone else who writes it from falling into complete and utter despair. I actually wonder sometimes how other people who aren’t poets can go through their days with all of the hardships, and the loneliness, and the difficulties, and the pain, and not have a way to process it. And the gift that poetry really gives the practitioner, that you give yourself when you’re writing, is that ability to grapple with these things you carry around and put them onto the page so that you can share them with other people. Then they can read what you’ve written and feel connected. You know, there’s just a kind of magic that happens. You feel seen, and you feel heard. That is the real gift, I feel, that we bring to people that we’re working with in carceral situations. Because many of the men are so alienated. They’ve had hard lives, and no one has ever given them permission to express themselves and to be vulnerable. And to do it in a way where they get to feel seen and heard. We’re giving them permission to access those thoughts and feelings and memories and wrangle all that into a container that they can share with their fellow humans. You know, I’ve seen big, burly, brawny gang members hug members of an opposite gang in a room and high-five each other because they were so excited about what they’d just written. And I’ve seen grown men weep when they share their poems. These are people who are learning how to put aside all those constructs and barriers—the prison of the self—and open up to other people. And I think that is the gift that poetry gives not only to us, as practitioners, but to other people when we teach them to write poetry as well. And really, truly, I don’t know how other people, non-poets, get through their lives without having a place to put all that stuff.
RP: Yes. Narrative means so much to a human animal. Telling one’s own story and feeling safe enough to do it honestly. Because it’s easy enough to tell stories, even about ourselves—or maybe especially about ourselves—that aren’t true. There’s this pressure to tell the story we think we should tell rather than the story we need to tell.
NMG: Right. And, you know, you always want to lean into the thing that you want to write the least. The thing you’re most afraid to write.
RP: Yes. Are there subjects or stories you’ve come up against where you’ve thought, I can’t write this yet? Something that you avoid because it’s still too hard, but that you know won’t be as difficult later?
NMG: It’s not so much that I avoid it. It’s more that I’m not able to get at it. Because I’ve tried to write about things when they’re still too fresh. And I just can’t get words on a page to actually capture the experience in any kind of meaningful poetic way. Sometimes I think it’s just that I’m still too close to something. I need more distance; I need more time. Maybe I need more healing. To answer your earlier question about fiction being less vulnerable than poetry, I absolutely think that it can be, because you’re writing from a persona. But at the same time, I remember when I was studying with Hubert Selby Jr., and he was talking about Last Exit to Brooklyn. There’s a scene in that book that’s just devastating. And he said that he had to go to bed for a week after he wrote it. He was so, so devastated by the choices that his character made. So I think when a fiction writer is invested in those characters, and their story, that it can be just as vulnerable if you’re letting them make their own choices, and you’re letting them inhabit your soul. And then they’re making mistakes and they’re fucking up, and you’re having to watch them get tortured as a result, or have their lives come crumbling down around them because they made bad decisions, just as people do in real life.
RP: That fierce little girl in the opening poem is a force of nature as a woman. You always seem to face challenges with composure and courage, addressing the darkness directly. I’m reminded of the fairy tale idea that in naming a thing, one can gain some power over it.
NMG: I do love that trope. And I think really what that speaks to is that if you’re carrying around some unprocessed painful memory or experience that you haven’t really grappled with or dealt with, when you process that and come to terms with it and try to put it on a page with words—name it—it helps you move through it. I think that’s what that comes from.
RP: Yes. If it’s just hidden in the dark, it’s never going to dissipate.
NMG: Yes. And I think the very act of giving yourself permission to write about something that you’re afraid of, or that you found hurtful, or that you’re ashamed of, helps, you know? I remember once, I was on an airplane, and I had just found out something that I didn’t know how to be honest about, because I felt like it reflected badly on me. And I thought, here I am sitting next to a kind person who I’m probably never going to see again. I’m going to just practice saying this stuff out loud to this stranger. And they were lovely and understanding and accepting, and it helped so much to know I could share a truth like that and still be okay.
RP: I’ve done things like that before. You discover that that random stranger has a similar story, or completely understands because of something they’ve been through. And the more we tell each other our truths, the less stigma there is about things that happen to people all the time, you know. Being human.
NMG: Yeah. We’re all just human. We’ve all made mistakes. We’ve all said and done things we wish we hadn’t. We all just want to be accepted, and we all just want to be loved.
RP: Yes, and that’s the thing about your poetry. You’ll say, here’s this terrible situation. But you look at it with such grace and forgiveness. There’s this tenderness that permeates your writing so that even the darkest things in the book have a redemptive quality. Does that surface naturally? Or do you ever look at your poems and think, Oh my gosh, I better add a little silver lining to that one? Or that needs something forgiving at the end?
NMG: I don’t think of it that way. In fact, you know that saying, “beware the false rise?” I want to be careful about not ending a poem so it’s all tied up in a neat little bow. You know that wonderful lesson from Marvin Bell that he used to say to us? “The poem ends. The poetry continues.” That’s what I want. I want the poetry to continue, and leaving things unresolved is fine. Was it Chekhov who said something like a story doesn’t need to solve the mystery, just deepen the question? But as far as silver linings go, sometimes if a poem is really dark, I do want to counterbalance it with some beauty. Because I want to juxtapose. I want to bump opposite things up against each other for tension and balance. And sometimes, if a poem is really filled with a lot of loveliness, I want to add some darkness into it.
RP: Like you do in the poem “The Game,” when you say, “I love you so much / I hate you.”
NMG: Right.
RP: You are incredibly generous, as a poet and a person, and an amazing advocate for others. You co-founded The Poetry in the Jails Project, and you’ve taught in the jails and prisons—the work that you share in your chapbook, Punishment. And now you are a mentor for Adroit’s Summer Mentorship Program. What do you think is most important for a writer who is just starting to find their voice or material? Do you encourage students to tell their stories, or do you focus more on simply writing, and finding inspiration around them?
NMG: I am so grateful to Peter LaBerge for asking me to mentor in the Adroit program. It’s a fantastic program. And he has given back so much to the writing community. In terms of what I teach people, I think a poet’s first job is to pay attention. That’s the first thing I encourage people to do. To start paying attention. To start noticing things. I know not everybody loves Mary Oliver, but I do. And she writes so many poems that are focused on the importance of paying attention. I think that’s one of the most important lessons for poets to learn. Because that’s your material. And if you’re not paying attention, then you don’t notice things. And if you don’t notice things, then what are you going to write about—your belly-button? When I seriously became a poet, I started to move through the world differently. I started to notice things differently that I hadn’t before. Kind of a heightened awareness. So that’s a place to start. And the second thing is: just see it as a craft, and work at it. Put words on the page every day. Show up. It’s that simple. You know, when I teach, especially when I teach in the jails, I don’t hold myself above any of the other writers in there. We’re all doing the best we can in our lives, trying to write as well as possible. We’re all on a spectrum of learning, and some people are further along than others, but it’s a craft. And we can get better at it. And I’m on that journey too. I’m still trying to learn and get better. And I think that’s what I encourage everyone to do that I’m working with, or mentoring, or teaching: just pay attention. Give yourself time to write, and read wildly and widely, because other writers are your teachers.
RP: They’re so lucky to have you as a teacher. You always have many plates spinning. In addition to teaching and mentoring, I believe you are working on a few other writing projects, including essays and a novel. What’s next for you?
NMG: I want to be a better writer. I have two novels in process, one pretty far along. I want to finish those. And I have a collection of personal essays that are ready to go out in the world. So that’s going to be next.
***
Rebecca Patrascu’s poetry and reviews have appeared in publications including The Adroit Journal, Pedestal Magazine, The Shore, The Midwest Quarterly, The Racket Journal, Pidgeonholes, Bracken Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and Valparaiso Review. She received an MFA from Pacific University and is the author of the chapbook Before Noon (Finishing Line Press). Patrascu lives in northern California.